A Cross-Cultural Investigation into the Role of Textual Coherence in L2 Writing Quality

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of corpus linguistics and natural language processing technologies, the measurement and analysis of textual cohesion have emerged as a focal point in second language (L2) writing assessment. However, the relationship between writing quality and textual cohesion among L2 writers from different cultural backgrounds remains underexplored. This study builds a small-scale corpus based on the ELLIPSE dataset, using “distance learning” as a writing prompt, and employs the TAACO tool to quantitatively analyze 489 L2 writing samples. Results indicate that cultural background does not exert a significant influence on writing quality. Additionally, both global cohesion and text-level cohesion demonstrate a significant positive correlation with writing quality. Among the 168 cohesion features examined, a combination of four key indices: functional word MATTR, adjacent two-paragraph overlap function lemmas, lemma MATTR, and binary adjacent two-paragraph overlap pronoun lemmas, explains 17.2% of the variance in writing quality. These findings highlight the critical role of textual cohesion in L2 writing evaluation from a cross-cultural perspective, offering theoretical insights for English writing instruction and practical implications for the development of automated essay scoring systems.